Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Celephais (77.0 Kb)

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"Celephais" is a fantasy story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in early November 1920 and first published in the May 1922 issue of the Rainbow. The title refers to a fictional city that later appears in H. P. Lovecraft?s Dream Cycle, including his novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926).Like many of Lovecraft's stories, "Celephais" was inspired by a dream, recorded in his commonplace book as "Dream of flying over city."The story resembles a tale by Lord Dunsany, "The Coronation of Mr. Thom... More >>>

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"Celephais" is a fantasy story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in early November 1920 and first published in the May 1922 issue of the Rainbow. The title refers to a fictional city that later appears in H. P. Lovecraft?s Dream Cycle, including his novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926).

Like many of Lovecraft's stories, "Celephais" was inspired by a dream, recorded in his commonplace book as "Dream of flying over city."

The story resembles a tale by Lord Dunsany, "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap" in The Book of Wonder, in which the title character becomes more and more engrossed in his imaginary kingdom of Larkar until he begins to neglect business and routine tasks of daily living, and ultimately is placed in a madhouse. The imagery of the horses drifting off the cliff may derive from Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky" (1891).

In the story, Celephais is created in a dream by Kuranes, a man of landed gentry who slowly slips away to the dream-world. After Kuranes dies, he became the king and chief god of the city. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph Carter pays a visit to Kuranes, finding that the great dreamer has grown so homesick for his native Cornwall, he has dreamed parts of Celephais to resemble the land of his boyhood. Kuranes advises Carter, on a mission to find his own dream-city, to be careful what he wishes for--he might get it.

About Author:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, known then simply as weird fiction.

HP Lovecraft was one of the early exponents of horror fantasy, best known for the series of works known collectively as the Cthulhu Mythos. He peppered his books with references to an occult work called The Necronomicon, and, as his fame grew, he was besieged by readers asking where they could find a copy of it. But the truth was that Lovecraft had invented the book and its title. He wrote in a letter of 1937: 'The name Necronomicon (necros, corpse; nomos, law; eikon, image = An Image of the Law of the Dead) occurred to me in the course of a dream, although the etymology is perfectly sound.' So the title came before everything else, and substituted, perfectly reasonably, for the work itself.

This is a game that many writers have played, and the history of literature is full of references to books that don't, in fact, exist. Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Dorothy L Sayers, Frank Herbert, Martin Amis, Arthur Conan Doyle and many, many others have all joined in. Some of my favourite fictional titles are from Kurt Vonnegut, who, as Kilgore Trout, writes non-existent works such as The Barring-Gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year's Masterpiece, which are usually accompanied by helpful plot summaries. Perhaps the most notorious fictional-book-inventors have been writers such as Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges; naturally enough, since their writing often draws attention to literature as itself an artefact.

With the Necronomicon there was a difference, however. Other writers began to treat it as if it really did exist, quoting from the nonexistent work and even composing large sections of it; several Necronomicons were in fact later published, by hoaxers including L. Sprague De Camp and Colin Wilson.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fiction featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christian humanism. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century, who together with Edgar Allan Poe has exerted "an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction". Stephen King has called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.